Federal officials filed a complaint on June 15 seeking to revoke the U.S. citizenship of Jaswinder Singh, a Salem business owner, in the U.S. District Court of Oregon in Eugene. The filing makes him the latest target of Justice Department Denaturalization Efforts and, officials say, the first such case brought in Oregon during President Donald Trump's second administration.
That alone gives the case its urgency today: a new federal action aimed at taking away the citizenship of a longtime Oregon resident, not a distant policy debate. Singh, who was granted naturalization after years in the immigration system, now faces a complaint built around a claim that he used one identity to enter that system and another to move through it.
Federal officials say Singh first came to their attention in 1990 at San Francisco International Airport without documents allowing him to enter the United States. They say he told officers then that his name was Balwinder Singh, that he was born in India in 1971 and that he had bought a Nepalese passport from a smuggler. Under that name, he was paroled into the country and later sought immigration authorization, but an immigration judge denied the application on Nov. 30, 1990, and ordered him deported.
After that order, officials say, Singh filed a second application under the name Jaswinder Singh. In that filing, he said he had arrived in the United States on Sept. 23, 1994, through Mexico after leaving India in July of 1994. The complaint says he also gave the names of his parents, and those names matched the ones listed under Balwinder Singh. The second application was granted on Aug. 14, 2003, setting in motion his later path to permanent residency on Feb. 23, 2008 and, eventually, naturalization.
That is where Singh’s account and the government’s case split sharply. In his 2013 naturalization application, he said his name was Jaswinder Singh, that he had never given false information and that he had never been ordered to be removed or deported. An Immigration Services Officer later said on May 13 that Singh willfully misrepresented his identity and immigration history throughout the naturalization process. The complaint also cites a fingerprint comparison report written in 2017, and says Homeland Security Investigations received the fingerprint request on Nov. 15, 2017.
Singh told the Statesman Journal that 2017 was when he was first stopped and questioned while traveling with his family. Officials, though, are treating that period as part of a longer paper trail that they say links the two identities. The complaint leaves the decisive question in the hands of the court: whether the government can prove that the identity shift was deliberate and material enough to strip Singh of the citizenship he has held since naturalization.
